Where do you start?

5 614 words in 140 lists — and the question of which come first. Here it is answered by calculation, not by assertion.

The usual answer to this question is a frequency list of Chinese. There is none here: such a list is a compiled work with rights of its own, and this site consists of nothing that was not written for it.

The calculation runs over this site itself. Every Chinese sentence on it — the example sentence of every word, the examples and rules of every grammar topic, the reading texts and whatever else is here — is counted word by word. That shows, for each word, how much of this material it unlocks.

That is less than a frequency list promises and more than it proves. It says nothing about Chinese as a whole. It says how far you get here — and this is the path you take if you learn here.

How much the first words unlock

The first …	cover
100 words	21.3 %
250 words	30.7 %
500 words	38.5 %
1 000 words	45.7 %
2 000 words	51.3 %
4 000 words	55.1 %
5 540 words	57.3 %

The curve flattens early, and that is what this page is really telling you: the first words bring far more than the ones after them. If you are starting from zero, do not start with the specialist lists.

What a Chinese sentence here is made of

from the word lists: 57.3 %
Framework: articles, auxiliaries, conjunctions: 39.6 %
in no list: 3.1 %

The middle figure is the reason this list does not start with an article: articles, auxiliaries and conjunctions make up a large share of all the words on this site and still appear in no vocabulary list. You learn them through grammar, not through flashcards — and ranking them here would mean offering someone an article as their first word. The third figure is the share of words in these sentences that no vocabulary list covers yet.

The first 500, in order

The number after each word is how often it occurs in the Chinese sentences on this site — occurrences are counted, not sentences. A click takes you to the list it is in.

All word lists By topic